Vocabulary Coverage And Grading Of The New Senior English For China-A Corpus-based Study

In China’s middle schools,textbooks are the most important source of English language students are exposed to.They are nearly the sole corpus for students to acquire knowledge of the English language and learn how to use it in trans-cultural communications.As around 98 percent of the English language that students have access to is found in their textbooks,evaluation of the quality of textbooks becomes an urgent task facing English educators.This research takes a structuralist approach to textbook evaluation,namely seeing a text as a congregation of linguistic components and singles out one component,i.e.vocabulary,for examination,to see whether its coverage and grading are appropriate or not.The current research project follows a corpus approach to do an empirical investigation of the five English textbooks for senior middle school entitled New Senior English for China(Student’s Book 1 to 5)published by the People’s Education Press in 2007.The statistical tool is a software program named RANGE,which is available on the Internet.It has three base-word lists set forth by the famous applied linguist Paul Nation built in it.The lists contain the most,second-most and third-most frequently used words to be employed as a yardstick for evaluating an English textbook’s vocabulary coverage.The rationale is that the more high-frequency words there are in a textbook,the better vocabulary selection it features.The investigation and analyses follow three steps.First,vocabulary in each textbook is matched against the first two most-frequently-used word lists provided by Nation to find the numbers and rates of overlapping lexicon,which is an indication of the textbooks’ vocabulary coverage.Next,the first two lists are used separately in comparison with vocabulary in each textbook.Then the resultant statistics are compared from book to book in ascending order to reveal the vocabulary grading of the five textbooks.Finally,the unmatched vocabularies(vocabulary in the textbooks but not in the lists + vocabulary in the lists but not in the textbooks)are classified and each class is subject to a close examination based on linguistic and TESL theories to find out why the vocabularies do not overlap.Each step leads to some discovery and out of the information gathered in the three steps,the implication is figured out concerning vocabulary coverage and grading in textbook compilation.The first step of the research finds that around 70% of the lexicon in the five textbooks overlaps with vocabulary on Nation’s first two base-word lists.This coverage rate has been claimed suitable by both foreign and domestic specialists.The second step of the research proves that an effort in lexical grading is obvious,although the degree of change from book to book is somewhat moderate.The third step of research reveals three things.(1)Some unmatched words are caused by different definitions of “word,” while some others by different ways of treating derived types.Those are not real disparity between the two corpuses.(2)The five textbooks contain grammatical terms,Chinese culture-specific words,and words from the American dialect.Those are in fact indispensable from English textbooks used by Chinese students.(3)One class of words from the lists uncovered by the five textbooks consists of outdated words.It seems sensible to leave out this class of words.Another group of uncovered words has to do with Western culture-specific concepts that are not frequently used by Chinese teenagers.Obviously those words cannot be neglected.But there is the question of when it is the best time to teach those words.On the whole,the five textbooks show shrewd vocabulary coverage and moderate vocabulary grading.Apart from the above discoveries,the investigation also reveals that there are a number of most-frequently used words missing from the five textbooks,for which no plausible reason can be given.However,irregularities are the nature of life and no statistical study is exempt from them.In the concluding part of the thesis,the limitations are named and suggestions are put forth regarding future research in this area of study.